UNEMPLOYED: WHY?

Charles Burgner: “Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood says ‘America is one big pothole right now. We need a transportation bill.’ I say, let the unemployed fix our infrastructure. We have 150,000 bridges and 35,000 schools in need of repair. Civil engineers give our entire infrastructure condition a grade of ‘D.’ Meanwhile, millions are unemployed and suffer needlessly for lack of work. Why? Because Washington is morally and ethically bankrupt and nuts!”

☞ As the President said to Congress last year — and to its Republican members frankly determined to see him fail — “Pass the American Jobs Act … right away.” They still could, but will presumably wait until at least the lame duck session in the hope of bringing him down first for “his” failure to create more jobs.

WHERE TO GIVE

Carl: “Which group should I give money to for Obama’s re-election? There are so many groups / organizations and I don’t want to throw my money away.”

☞ Most political money goes to what will be an ocean of television advertising in the fall. It’s necessary, but the marginal utility is low. If anything, all that advertising will turn people off. The leverage is in giving — now — to the Obama Victory Fund 2012, much of which support goes to paying thousands of field organizers (last I looked, we had 22 offices open in Florida alone) whose main job is to recruit, train, and motivate volunteers to recruit, train and motivate more volunteers — ultimately, each one paid field organizer snowballs into hundreds of volunteers — who will spend the next months helping to register millions of new voters (many of whom were 16 or 17 last time) and to RE-register millions of existing voters whom the Republicans are working so hard to disenfranchise. If we can turn out those incremental voters as we did in 2008, we hold the White House and Senate, take back the House, and keep from losing the Supreme Court for the next 20 years.

Quote of the Day

It was only 80 years from the time Darwin published ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES until we detonated the first nuclear bomb. In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

~Paleontologist Jack Horner

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